What a Sigh is there

 

 

It was my birthday a while ago and my lovely mother-in-law sent me a batch of rock-music-themed T-shirts as a present.  One was emblazoned with the striking cover-illustration of the 1998 album Cruelty and the Beast by County Suffolk gothic / symphonic heavy metal band Cradle of Filth.  Cruelty and the Beast was a concept album inspired by the legendary 16th / 17th century Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory, who supposedly bathed in the blood of slaughtered virgins in an attempt to keep herself young-looking.  (Fittingly, the album featured narration by the late, great horror-movie actress Ingrid Pitt, who played Bathory in the 1971 Hammer film Countess Dracula.)  Anyway, I’d been waiting for an opportunity to wear this new T-shirt in public.  The opportunity arrived on October 16th, when Japanese black metal band Sigh performed at Singapore’s Phil Studio.

 

 

Actually, my T-shirt matched the macabre vibe established by the second support act, the Singaporean Tok Yathraa.  (I couldn’t get away from work early enough to catch the first support act, which was N3M3515 – think of those numbers as letters – described intriguingly online as a “one-man ChipDoom Project from Singapore, armed with a Classic Gameboy, combining elements from Sludge Doom and Hardcore.”)  Tok Yathraa is a black-shrouded, hooded, white-faced, rather Bergmanesque figure who, when interviewed on the Filthy Gods of Metal website, described himself as “a one-man band which started on 16th May 2020… heavily influenced by King Diamond, Mercyful Fate, Black Sabbath, Immortal, S.M. Salim, Judas Priest and Wings.”  It might come as a shock for the classic Malay singer S.M. Salim or, indeed, Paul McCartney’s Wings to find themselves included in such illustriously metallic company.  In the same interview, he called his music “bomoh metal, a fusion of black metal plus heavy metal plus focusing on subjects of local / Asia ghosts.”

 

Now fronting a three-piece band with a drummer and bass-player, Tok Yathraa put on a show that was simultaneously spooky and good fun, with his references to the ghosts and folklore of the Malay Peninsula nicely anticipating Halloween at the end of this month.  He went down well with the small but enthusiastic crowd whom, at the beginning of his set, he encouraged to stand close to the stage to make things more intimate.

 

 

Headliners Sigh also have roots in the sub-genre of black metal, which esteems shrieking vocals, hectic and distorted guitars and copious allusions to occult, Satanic and / or pagan skulduggery, and is essayed by corpse-painted and pseudonym-laden musicians.  Indeed, historically, their black metal credentials are impeccable.  They formed in 1989, heavily inspired by the black metal scene becoming popular – and soon notorious – in Scandinavia and a few years later were signed to the Norwegian label Deathlike Silence Records by Euronymous, co-founder of the band Mayhem.  And, yes, Euronymous was the bloke who’d be stabbed to death in 1993 by Varg Vikernes, of the band Burzum, during a period when the Norwegian black metal scene went down some very dark roads indeed.

 

 

But in the three decades since – during which time, vocalist, keyboardist and bassist Mirai Kawashima has been the band’s leading light and one, enduring member – Sigh have also distinguished themselves with their willingness to experiment.  Their sound has incorporated elements from classical music, traditional Japanese music and elsewhere, so that it’s earned such epithets as ‘avant-garde’ and ‘progressive’.  Their eclectic-ness was certainly on display tonight.  For example, their second singer and multi-instrumentalist Dr Mikannibal – according to Google AI, she’s actually a professor with ‘a doctorate in physics form the University of Tokyo’ – played a shamisen at one point and a saxophone at another.  That was when she wasn’t pouring fake blood over her face from a goblet and shrieking sepulchrally – all good, ghoulish fun, by the way.

 

 

Their set – much of which was drawn from the 2007 album Hangman’s Hymn, which they re-recorded this year as I Saw the World’s End – Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV, and from the 2022 album Shiki – was a riot.  It contained enough of the band’s original black metal lodestone to keep headbangers in the audience happy but offered plenty of other elements to keep the proceedings fresh and unpredictable.  The band’s look was great too.  It was obviously influenced by such Japanese things as manga, kabuki and ukiyo-e – the colourful woodblock prints from the Edo period – as well as by Tim Burton and the traditional corpse-paint and general gruesomeness of black metal.  I noticed how the guitarists had painted-on stitch-marks at the corners of their mouths, suggesting Kuchisake Onna, the fearsome slit-mouthed lady of Japanese urban myth.  Though I don’t know what the black mask (or was it black gunk?) covering the face of the drummer was meant to represent.  Anyway, he looked pretty fearsome too.

 

 

As I said, the crowd was relatively small, but the performers gave it their all.  There was a splendid vibe and I had a great night.  In my heavy metal live-music memories, this will be up there with seeing Megadeth (supported by Korn) in Chicago in 1995, or Motorhead (supported by Saxon) in Norwich in 2009.  It didn’t matter that it wasn’t massively attended.  I tried to explain this to Tok Yathraa, whom I encountered at the end of the evening, after Sigh had finished their set.  He looked slightly bemused by my enthusiasm.  Well, I’d had a few beers by then.

 

One thing did put a dampener on the evening, though.  Also after the gig’s end, I got talking to one of Phil Studio’s staff-members and learned from him that the venue will be closing down on November 2nd.  This is thanks to an economically lethal cocktail of ‘high operational costs, compliance burdens, regulatory red tape, and double standards’.  It comes in the wake of the closure two months ago of the Projector Cinema, a rare place in Singapore where you could get to see movies considered too niche to be shown in the city’s cineplexes.  Oh dear, Singapore.  If you keep on shedding your independent, alternative and idiosyncratic creative spaces like this, you’re going to end up as bland, corporate and culturally airless as Dubai…  Or indeed, Edinburgh (see here, here and here).

 

Singapore unmasked

 

From unsplash.com / © Brian Asare

 

Earlier this month Singapore’s Ministry of Health announced that it no longer perceived Covid-19 as a threat and the city-state’s ‘disease-response level’ would be lowered from ‘green’ to ‘yellow’.  For those people visiting Singapore, this means they no longer have to buy Covid-19 travel insurance, and visitors not fully vaccinated no longer have to show test results to prove their uninfected status.  It also looks like Singapore’s Trace Together app – something I had to constantly use when I arrived here a year ago, and without which I would probably have spent my first few months living on the streets – will be discontinued.  The most noticeable relaxation of all, however, is that, since February 13th, face-masks are no longer compulsory on Singapore’s public transport system. *

 

Thus, riding Singapore’s buses – as I normally do twice a day, to get to and from work – has been a strange experience during the past week.  I’ve had to mentally adjust to seeing the entirety of other passengers’ faces.  Not that all of them aren’t wearing masks now, of course.  A lot of passengers still are, mostly, I have to say, the Singaporeans ones.  It’s largely passengers from the country’s sizeable Western community who are suddenly, brazenly flaunting their facial features for the first time in a couple of years.

 

Perhaps I’m just odd, but I don’t actually mind people wearing masks around me.  The masks make me take more notice of their eyes, the windows of the soul, and create a general air of mystery.  “What marvellously alluring eyes that person has,” I might say to myself.  “But I wonder what lurks lower down, concealed by their mask?  Perchance a mouthful of Shane McGowan-style dental work?”  Such are the thoughts I entertain as I make the 45-minute bus journey to and from my workplace in central Singapore.  “Could that masked person be a gorgeous Singaporean equivalent of Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman from Batman?  Or do they really resemble Lon Chaney Sr, from The Phantom of the Opera (1925)?”  And in fact, I’ve seen a number of articles in the past few years claiming that a Covid-19 mask adds to a person’s aura of attractiveness.

 

It’s no surprise that an East Asian country like Singapore has stuck with its mask mandate for so long (way after Western ones have abandoned them), and its population has happily complied with it.  Wearing a surgical mask when you’re unwell with something that might be contagious has never been a big deal in this part of the world.  It was one of the first things I noticed when I started working in Asia, in Japan back in 1989 – folk suffering from a cold or a dose of the flu would mask up to avoid passing something on to their fellow citizens.  Indeed, the surgical mask is so engrained on Japanese culture that there’s even a well-known figure of urban folklore, Kuchisake Onna, whose gimmick is that she wears one.  Since Kuchisake Onna is a homicidal spirit who takes the form of a seemingly beautiful woman, that mask has a macabre function.  It conceals a grotesquely widened mouth, its ends cut open as far as the ears.

 

© JollyRoger

 

Inevitably, the implementation of measures against Covid-19 was, in the West at least, immediately incorporated into the culture wars that these days rage between the right and the left in just about every area of politics and society.  The sort of people who rant and rave against woke universities, LGBT rights, asylum seekers, critical race theory, restrictions on gun ownership, taking action against climate change and, in the latest manifestation of right-wing insanity, the so-called ’15-minute city’, have spent the last three years rupturing their hernias about mask mandates, lockdown orders and Covid-19 vaccinations.  In the USA, millions of gun-toting, Trump-loving, QAnon-believing macho-men pooped their pants in rage when it was suggested that they don a small piece of cloth over their mouths and nostrils to prevent them getting a virus and, equally importantly, prevent them possibly passing it on to their fellow human beings. The very thought of such a thing was a violation of their rights and ’freeee-dum’, apparently.

 

The UK was also beset with Covid-19-induced whinging, most notably at alleged news station – though these days it’s more a drop-in centre for conspiracy-theory nutjobs – GB News.  Much of it emanated from GB News pundit and supposed archaeologist Neil Oliver, whose schtick is to stare ashen-faced into the camera for six, seven, eight minutes or more and deliver a doom-laden monologue of right-wing paranoia, dog-whistles, unsubstantiated claims and windy, overwrought rhetoric that his hard-of-thinking viewers probably think is Shakespearean.  He’s spent much of the pandemic lamenting about anti-Covid-19 measures and how, say, they’ve deprived children of a vital, communal story-telling tradition that’d hitherto existed unbroken since tribal campfires on the far side of the Ice Age.  Or some drivel like that.

 

© GB News / From indy100.com

 

Oliver’s nadir came in 2021 when he declared, “If your freedom means that I might catch Covid from you, then so be it.  If my freedom means that you might catch Covid from me, then so be it.”  And presumably, if the person who caught it from him was a highly-at-risk octogenarian or person with serious underlying health issues who didn’t want to catch Covid-19 from anybody…  Well, tough shit.  At least they’d die of the virus with their freedom intact, which was the important thing.

 

Then, swooping off into realms of total doolally-ness, Oliver likened the Covid-sceptic minority in Britain, himself included presumably, to the pilots who flew Spitfires and Hurricanes against the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain: “They risked everything for freedom.”  Forgive me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the entire population of Britain during World War II surrender a whole bunch of their freedoms whilst trying to unite against, and overcome, an external threat?  I can’t imagine Oliver lasting long in London in 1940 if he’d insisted on having his houselights blazing every night because doing so was in the name of ‘freedom’.  Yeah, leave my rights alone, Mr Churchill!

 

Anyway, for the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to wear a face-mask while I use Singapore’s public transport system.  I’ve had Covid but my partner hasn’t.  Though she’s fully vaxed and boostered up, she probably hasn’t developed the level of immunity to it that I have, and I’d hate to bring the thing home one day and pass it onto her.  Also, I’m not convinced we’re out of the woods yet with Covid.  I’m sure it’s possible that future, nasty variants will appear and wreak more havoc.  And thirdly, I’ll keep wearing my mask because it’s the sort of gesture that Neil Oliver would wholly despise.

 

And if it’s despised by him, it must be the right thing to do.

 

From unsplash.com / © Anshu A

 

* Face masks still have to be worn, though, in Singapore’s hospitals.